Category Archives: Tips and Tricks

Amazon Book Sales RSS Feed Improvements

Thanks to feedback from a NovelRank user, RSS feeds for individual books has been improved, especially for Firefox users! Now, when you go to a book’s details page such as the book Body Rolling, you will now notice that in the toolbar at the top is the famous RSS subscribe icon letting you know that there are RSS feeds available on this page! These are the same RSS Feeds that are available under the RSS feeds tab, including Amazon book sales.

Furthermore, if you go directly to one of these feeds, Firefox will automatically understand that this is an RSS feed and offer to add it as a Live Bookmark for you!

So now it is even easier to get your Amazon book sales or sales rank feeds in RSS form. Thanks to Stephanie Golden for bringing this to my attention!

Create an ePub Format Version of Your eBook

The ePub format has quickly become the standard for distributing an ebook to the masses using a digital reader. With the iPad continuing to sell well and ePub the standard for the iBook app for browsing for books on the iPad, it is important to get your book in the ePub format so you can share your ebook easily!

Some companies are offering conversion of the PDF or DOC version of your book to ePub format for a fee, but a new service has popped which does all this automatically for you! The service is called ePubBud and it was designed to look like the interface of the ubiquitous YouTube. To see an example, here is Mario Lurig’s ePub book (hey, that’s me!).

The steps are pretty straightforward:

Choose to upload a new book or create a new ebook on the ePubBud site
You will be prompted to make an account after the first step above
You will now be able to update all of the book info, provide a link to the paper version, charge for the book, etc. You can also choose to share it publicly (link at the very top)

Once the ePub book is created, you can download it directly from the site and save it for your own uses! Yes, it is pretty simple, but time for some caveats…

The site is changing regularly as features are being added, so if something is broken, you may have to come back. It should be marked ‘Beta’.
The interface for updating book information can be confusing, and not all options are in one place, sometimes split in different parts of the page
The target audience is not mainstream authors, but that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from this website!
I’ve never tested the ‘charge for book’ option
Some of the above instructions may be different in the future… I’m sorry? Joys of a new website

NovelRank nor I are affiliated with this website in any way.

Add Your Book Sales to iGoogle using RSS Feed

I love RSS Feeds, and even moreso, I love the book sales RSS feed. It gives me an easy way to know when I last sold a book on Amazon, what domain it was on, and how many copies were sold. However some people don’t know what an RSS feed is nor the benefits of them, so I decided to add a quick tip on how to get the RSS feed into your iGoogle homepage. This allows you to start your computer and browser and be immediately met with the recent sales information. You can even click through the links in the book sales results and see your page on NovelRank. Here are the easy steps.

Create your iGoogle page

Go to http://www.google.com/ig. You will then create a homepage or click the sign in link in the bottom left if you have a google account (I have a gmail account). All of these widgets can be dragged and moved around the page so you can get the most important stuff up top. You can also remove any you don’t want to keep it from being too cluttered. There’s lots to explore here, so let’s just jump right into the next step.

Get your book sales rss feed from NovelRank

Go to your book’s page on NovelRank. Click on the RSS Feeds box near the top to expand out the list of available RSS feeds.

You can right-click on the Books Sold RSS Feed and choose “Copy Link Location” (Firefox), “Copy Link” (Safari), or “Copy Shortcut” (Internet Explorer) to copy the link to your clipboard. We’ll be using it in just a moment.

Adding an RSS Feed to iGoogle

In the top-right of the iGoogle homepage, click the Add Stuff link. The next page has a ton of widgets, but you are interested in the Add feed or gadget link near the bottom of the left column. Click the link and it will expand to a box where you can now Paste in the link that you copied earlier.

The link you are pasting will look similar to this (don’t copy in this link, example only!):

http://www.novelrank.com/asin/143571590X/rss

Click the Add button and the small window will update to tell you it was successfully added. Click the « Back to iGoogle home link in the top-right. You will now see the new widget/box in the top-left with the contents of the RSS feed. Be advised that this box may be empty if there have been no sales yet tracked by NovelRank.

That’s it! Keep selling your books!